This morning, the following title variation feels closest to the heart of my project:
Popularising ecosystem restoration to reimagine climate futures, tighten human-nature relationships and empower a #GenerationRestoration: a narrative-driven strategy board game
How did I get to this point?
Throughout the ideation of my project (it has not yet really moved beyond ideation, but that’s fine), I have really enjoyed the liberating process of narrowing down my focus and finding comfort in doing “little”.
Hence, from an academically-driven storytelling toolkit for embedding ecosystem restoration into climate futures, which was supposed to be attached to a board game as the more creative part of the output, I have moved my attention to just doing a board game, with any research made solely to strengthen that game’s fidelity to the cause.
In previous entries, I alluded to how this narrowing and shifting of focus towards the game output makes sense due to time limitations, feasibility and creative enjoyment.
Over the last few days, I have thought especially about the more big picture personal motivations: How does this project’s focus fit into what I might do after?
Revising my professional focus
I realise that I often viewed this MSc as a means for an escape, a restart, a new path. Tackling a long-felt burn-out from a 10-year long dedication to raising youth awareness on climate justice and forest restoration, throwing myself into a new discipline, city, and community, felt like a chance to start anew from scratch.
But I didn’t. I didn’t find the courage (?) to abandon my responsibilities towards my NGO which I both loved like a child and hated as a prison cell at the same time. With the NGO at a low-point, my previous team having shrunk to a team of one, throwing myself 100% into Narrative Futures & Edinburgh would mean leaving this “child” to starve and die, the 10 years of half-successful work to build something up fizzling away.
And so I continued to balance the Master’s with the NGO, split between two places and two paths, often feeling like I’m doing exactly what Ron Swanson says you should never do:
Thankfully, not long ago came a renaissance of hope for my NGO work. A few long-watered trees finally bore overdue fruit, symbolically speaking, and the dying child got a promise of funding to expand the team by our first full-time employee asap, thus losing the jail bars I felt around me, allowing me to focus more on what I want and less on what I must.
With that promise came another: should I return to Czechia after the MSc is done and settle in Prague, the support to allow my full-time employment in the NGO would follow. An optional condition: that I mold my role within the NGO to do more of the things that bring me joy, including creative and narrative-focused work building on the MSc.
So, I realised that the binary Swansonian optic doesn’t need to apply. The seemingly incompatible shards of split focus now feel more like puzzle pieces that are meant to come together.
And this dissertation is the connecting piece.
Instead of it being an avenue to begin a whole new path, it can be a way to make the old path exciting again. So, compatibility with my NGO work will be a critical lens in shaping my game going forward.
This means:
- tailoring the game for a target audience compatible with that of my NGO
- deliberately utilising resources, expertise and experience available within the wider NGO
- highlighting narratives, messages and learning outcomes that are core to the organisation’s DNA
Should anything go sideways, should preferences change, the game will still remain as my project that I can develop separately.
But, it is my greatest hope that once I return to the NGO in Autumn with a full stamina bar, I will be holding a heavy board game box under my arm with both my name and the NGO’s logo slapped on the cover.
